Amazon, another big IPO company, has tons of content, but supports only a very limited hypertext model. Oh, they love inbound links over there, but are loathe to reciprocate. And the web is that much poorer for it. My Amazon.com reviews could be information-packed nexus hubs for bringing diverse web pages closer together. Instead, all hypertext content is inferred and finding it on the web is left as an exercise to the reader, usually with Google. My friend Joe King, who is something of a pragmatic idealist, recently went to Amazon.com to head up their blog-oriented efforts. If he succeeds, Amazon will be a great citizen in the blogosphere.

It would be sobering to both Amazon.com and Google.com if they were to pay a per-page microcontent fee to Ted Nelson, who arguably first clearly envisioned the document architecture that these companies utilize. Google, especially, through AdSense and AdWords, and the fact that their scraped content is merely 'transcluded' content from other web sites, is biting hard on Nelson's hypertext universe. In Nelson's model of transclusion, he envisioned Google paying a micro-content fee for the scraped, transcluded content authored by the greater universe of human beings.

Brewster Kahle, with his Archive-the-web project also happens to be the designer of WAIS (see previous post). He definitely gets it.